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Personality tests

After seeing it on Charlie Stross’s diary, I just did an on-line Myers-Briggs personality test. The results?

ISFP

ISFP – “Artist”. Interested in the fine arts. Expression primarily through action or art form. The senses are keener than in other types. 5% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Artist? I’m an artist? The last M-B test I did was back at teacher training college. I don’t remember what personality type I came out as back then, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t “Artist”. Have I changed so much since then?

I’m generally disinclined to put much stock in personality tests. I’m happy enough to spend a few minutes filling in the answers to silly questions to find out what science fiction/fantasy character I am. (Boromir, hmph; at least I go out in a blaze of glory.) But it’s painfully easy to second-guess the questions and subvert the results to reflect your own deluded self-image. If you think they’re anything more revealing than, say, your star sign, then that in itself says more about you than the average test does.

(Myers-Briggs tests can be an exception. M-B personality typing is a well-understood field, and properly administered tests try to take personal bias into account. Most on-line versions aren’t properly administered, but some do make an attempt to minimize the influence of ego (or should that be the id?) by asking the same question in different ways.)

I’d be far more interested in seeing a site that allowed other people to answer questions about you. Now that would be revealing.

When I joined the Royal Bank of Scotland as a trainee in 1996, a group of us got sent to Barfil Farm (and Management Centre) in Dumfriesshire for a team-building course with the excellent Bob Lee. After three days of seminars, role-playing exercises, intensive team-working, and a certain amount of alcohol, we had a round-table session where each of us had to evaluate someone else. We were given a sheet of paper with a bundle of adjectives on it, and we had to circle the ones we thought were most appropriate to our subject.

Now, I don’t even remember which of my other fellow trainees I had to report on, let alone what I said about them. I also don’t remember any of the positive things that were said about me. But here are are three adjectives that will forever be etched in my memory: distant, ruthless, and patronising.

They resonated with me because I dislike those traits in other people. I didn’t (and don’t) want to be like that myself, but that was how someone perceived me. Someone who was not close enough to be a friend (and therefore wary of hurting my feelings), yet not so unfamiliar that they had no idea who I really was (because of the three days of working closely together). Basically, someone who had enough information to form a decent, relatively objective opinion.

Having that external perspective allows me to do something about it. Knowing what I want to avoid, I can (try to) modify my actions and behaviour. In comparison, virtually any on-line test you take will try to massage any negative traits into admirable strengths. You may be a cold-blooded serial killer, but at you’re also methodical, tidy, and have a strongly developed sense of natural justice. Hum.

Don’t expect to develop self-knowledge in isolation, or through self-administered personality tests. At heart, everyone thinks they’re pretty decent. To see the whole picture, you have to seek out your reflection in the mirror of other people. On the one hand, this can be a gift:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
     An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
     And ev’n Devotion!

Robert Burns – To A Louse

On the other hand, chances are you won’t like what you see. Jean-Paul Sartre, ever the optimist, put it succinctly: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people. Being told that you don’t actually match up to your own image of perfection and virtue is both painful, and immensely valuable.

There are all sorts of lessons here about pride and humility, applicable to fields ranging from writers workshops to international politics. But I’ll leave you to think about them for yourself.

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A 400g Toblerone day

You know those days when you just have to eat an entire 400g bar of Toblerone chocolate triangles? I’ve been having a lot of those lately.

Fortunately for my waistline, I haven’t been giving in to the temptation. Today was an exception, though. After several weeks of searching, this morning I accepted a nice job offer, and gave notice of resignation to my current employer. If that’s not worthy of some chocolate gluttony, I don’t know what is.

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Bayesian filter for blog comments

I don’t get much comments spam myself right now (maybe a message a week or so), but the problem is definitely getting worse.

For Movable Type installations, there are several solutions available, such as an option to provide a “delete this comment” link with every “new comment” email, and a combined url blocker/comments hider technique. Also, some people have proposed collaborative blacklists, or collaborative authentication for comments posters.

I’m surprised that no-one seems to have suggested Bayesian filtering for comments, though. I get about 15-20 spam messages via email every day, but the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook routes almost all of them straight into a “Spam” folder. I never see them in my inbox. Maybe one or two message in a hundred make it through the filter, and I haven’t had any false positives for ages. It doesn’t involve maintaining blacklists, and it’s a lot less effort than deleting every single junk message.

In Movable Type, it you could have a “bayesfilter” property on the MTComments template tag: <MTComments bayesfilter="1">. All comments would have to pass through the filter, and only those that were not spam would make it on to the page.

You’d need some additional mechanism to “train” the system, and somewhere to put the statistical knowledge base the filter uses to tell spam from genuine comments. Finally, you’d need a way of correcting the system after the initial training, so that any spam that does make it through can be deleted with prejudice, and so that false positives can be corrected.

This would be a nice anti-spam comments system. It would involve a Movable Type plugin, and some hacking to the Movable Type application itself. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do this right now, and even if I did have time, I’ve sworn off perl. (Did you know that “perl” is an anagram of “pain”?) But I wonder if the Lazyweb could do it for me, or if the nice people at Six Apart would be so kind as to include this feature in MT Pro?

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Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome

Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome (SPS) is what happens when a writer gets to the end of a story, finds that the Protagonist doesn’t have the means to resolve (or even influence) the final conflict themselves, and therefore pulls in an Outside Agency to do it for them. The Protagonist may skulk around the periphery of the action and deliver a running commentary on events, or they may get called in for the mopping-up scene, where they find out how the Outside Agency put the pieces together and finally came through to pull the Protagonist’s nuts out of the fire.

Key questions to ask to find out if a story is suffering from SPS:

  • If the Outside Agency had not stepped in, would the final conflict have turned out the same way, or would the outcome have been completely different?
  • Did the Protagonist issue direct instructions for the Outside Agency to act, or did the Agency come in of their own accord? (Having the Outside Agency ignore dire warnings from the Protagonist, only to come through in the end, may offset the worst effects of SPS.)
  • Once the Outside Agency stepped in, did they need the help of the Protagonist in order to emerge victorious, or was the Protagonist just another concerned onlooker (aka JAFO)?

The worst case of SPS I’ve come across recently was Vitals by Greg Bear. Nasty. If you can think of any, please zap ’em in the comment section.

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One for the laydeez

Alex still cries when I drop him off at nursery in the mornings. Or at least, he does most of the time. He was okay-ish this Monday–no all-out despair and wailing–but on Tuesday I saw a side of him that doesn’t usually come out when I leave him there.

He was looking exceptionally cool that morning: blue long-sleeved shirt, tan corduroys, new brown boots, denim jacket, and orange sunglasses. After I took off his jacket and shades, he poked his head through the doorway into the toddler room and scoped out the joint. Then he walked back to me and put his hands up in the universal “cuddle” gesture. So far, so normal.

I picked him up, and together we walked into the room. He rested his chin on my shoulder, but he didn’t seem as upset as he often does. One of the nursery assistants came up to us, said hello, and asked Alex if he wanted a cuddle from her. He nodded quietly, and clambered over into her arms.

I was just starting to wave goodbye to him, when I noticed two young girls, both a little older than Alex, maybe 3 or 3 and a half, walking over. They waved at him and said “Alex! Alex! Hello Alex!”

He looked down at them, and then back at me. His early morning frown slowly turned into a sly, cheeky grin, as if to say, “Look what I’ve found.”

There he was, my two-year-old son, already at the centre of attention of gangs of adoring older women. He may be Super Tantrum Toddler Man at home, but he can turn the charm all the way up to 11 when he wants to.

What a boy.